STANDING in the interminable queue at Primark the other day, I fell into conversation with a Somali woman. We talked, as you do, about our children, and when I told her that I had two daughters, she expressed her deepest sympathy. “You’re not too old to try for a son,” she insisted (flatteringly, but probably inaccurately).

When I explained that I was really happy with my girls, and did not at all mind not having a boy, she found this completely baffling.

“No, no,” she kept protesting, “you must have another baby.” To her, the notion that a mother could be content without a son was unfathomable.

It is this cultural preference for boys over girls — expressed most damagingly in China and South Asia — that makes many people recoil at the notion that we should be allowed to choose the sex of our babies.

In China, thanks to infanticide and selective abortions following ultrasound scans, there are now only 833 young girls for every 1,000 boys. India has a similar problem: an estimated 13.7 million girls have “disappeared” since 1981. But that is no reason to suppose that such a demographic disaster would happen here.

In a consultation paper out last week, the Department of Health floated the idea that sex selection might be allowed for “family balancing” reasons. In other words, we could be allowed to choose a boy or a girl only if we already had, say, two or three or four children of the opposite sex. This would not permit Chinese or Indian — or indeed Somali — parents to choose only boys.

What is more, there is no reason to suppose that in Britain as a whole (as opposed to some ethnic minority communities) one sex would be preferred over another. A team of researchers from the University of Giessen in Germany conducted a survey of the sex preferences of British parents and discovered that only a small proportion had a preference for all or mostly one sex, and that these were similar for both sexes.

What most British parents wanted — 68 per cent of them — was an equal number of boys and girls. Only 6 per cent wanted more boys than girls, and 4 per cent more girls than boys.

And the evidence from other countries is that very few parents would actively seek out sex selection — certainly not enough to tip the demographic balance either way. In America, sex selection has been available since 1995 for family balancing, but has been used only by about 2,000 couples.

Those couples, though, are desperate — and I can completely understand why. In an all-boy family, a mother can easily feel testosteroned-out and yearn for a daughter to keep her company. Equally, when a father is the only man in the household, he may feel suffocated by a miasma of fashion, cosmetics and sparkly jewellery.

Some people fear that there will be a psychological impact from sex selection. How will the youngest daughter feel if the next child has been chosen to be a boy? Not half as bad as the youngest child would feel if she turned out — without the help of sex selection — to be female too.

As the law stands at the moment, couples are forced to try again and again for the sex they want. The resulting children are bound to sense the disappointment that their parents feel when the squirt of lemon or the high-sodium diet or the immaculate timing hasn’t worked.

As for the idea that choosing your child’s sex is somehow immoral, why do the same critics not inveigh against these more homespun techniques? The intention behind them is exactly the same, after all, whether you are dosing yourself with salty food or sending his sperm to a lab.

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